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Mobile App Compiler OpenPlug Joins Alcatel-Lucent

Maybe you love mobile apps - or maybe you build them yourself. Either way, it's big news that international mobile infrastructure conglomerate Alcatel-Lucent has acquired cross-platform mobile app development tool and compiler OpenPlug.

Alcatel-Lucent, a company with a nearly $6 billion market cap, will soon begin offering OpenPlug's Adobe Flex application development tool that compiles apps into native code. It will be offered both direct to developers (freemium) and to telephony service providers around the world interested in exposing their technology to build a developer community. Telephony could be just the beginning as well, as Alcatel has DVRs and other connected devices in its long-term sights. As part of a platform play, this acquisition is like a seed; densely packed with promise, aiming to power the reinvigoration of the world's telephone companies. It may or may not work. Enabling apps to drive consumer demand for data is the strategy.

Google Wave entered the Google Apps family earlier this year with what looked like some momentum.

Novell had integrated Google Wave into its Pulse project. SAP had developed a collaborative business process modeling tool within Google Wave. Salesforce.com had called Google Wave a "seminal cloud technology." Several more had also bet on Google Wave's future.

There is a long list of things people will tell you that you need as a startup: You need a working product. You need a business plan. You need a lawyer. You need a good coffee maker, a video game system, and beer on Fridays.

Here's one more thing for the list: you need an API. And here are the top five reasons why:

Any of Facebook's over 400 million users will immediately recognize some new features on popular Twitter photo-sharing service Twitpic today as users can now tag people in their photos. In a blog post this morning, the two-year-old company announced it had passed the 10 million user mark and that it sees 40 million unique visitors each month. The company says it is releasing its Face Tagging functionality "to show [its] thanks" to the community, but could it bring headaches and worries with it too?

The flood of news from Google I/O continues as the company has announced a pair of services available to developers that provide public access to some of Google's internal data-analysis tools. BigQuery, a service for analyzing massively large sets of data, and Prediction API, an interface for utilizing Google's prediction algorithms, are now available to developers in the Google Code Labs. To break down these heavy new tools, we spoke with former Apple engineer and big-data geek Pete Warden.

Warden believes these new tools from Google could commoditize previously close-guarded technologies, allowing startups to quickly and easily leverage things like sentiment-analysis. "Assuming it does what it says on the label, this opens up a lot of technology problems to bootstrapped startups that previously required serious funding to tackle," he told ReadWriteWeb.

There is a significant risk and reward that comes with developing products that leverage third-party application programming interfaces, or APIs. Twitter has used its API to let others spread the word for them; applications like Tweetie and TweetDeck help Twitter reach a broader audience on a variety of devices while making money for themselves. However, downtime for a service offering their API to developers means downtime for every service that relies on it for its API data. In the case of Facebook application developers, continuing reliability issues with the platform have become a cause for concern.

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. He has now set out to build The Future - specifically your future, your intentions, your plans as a platform for analysis and software development.

The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson's new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson's alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than "to be the platform for all 'intent' data," Mark Hendrickson says.

This morning Canadian startup accelerator Bootup Labs showcased some of its program graduates at Plug and Play Center's Sunnyvale location. While a number of the companies show promise, it was a gaming product that caught our attention. DimeRocker is offering developers a chance to elevate the level of gaming experiences and monetization on sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo.

At yesterday's Blackberry Developer Conference, several companies announced major updates to their applications and services designed for Blackberry smartphones. From Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) came new geolocation, advertising and push services in addition to other developer tools. Meanwhile, companies like Loopt, eBay, Xobni, and others took the opportunity to show off their latest Blackberry applications as well.

Augmented Reality (AR), the class of technologies that places sets of data on top of other views of the world around a user, is fast becoming a very crowded market. Austrian AR browser maker Wikitude has taken a very competitive step this afternoon with the release of its Application Programming Interface (API) to power AR browsers on any other application.

The company says its API "represents the emergence of an open AR development platform which could further drive the adoption of Wikitude as a potential standard for developers who want to create their own mobile AR experience." Get ready to see Augmented Reality come to far more mobile applications and for Wikitude's competitors to respond.